English 330, Fall 2016, Grand Valley State University

Johnson: Analysis 5- Curious Incident

This week I will be the first to say that I absolutely loved this book, and it was by far my favorite piece we’ve covered this semester. There were a few things in this book that made me like it so much. First, it was narrated by a younger individual which I am a big fan of stories narrated by children. Also, I loved all of the thoughts and insight the book had. Again, I’m a big fan of books that really give you a look into how the person is viewing things, and gives you personal thoughts and feelings right from that individual’s brain. One more thing I really enjoyed in this story was the fact that even though the narrator was an autistic boy, I felt as if this was the first piece we have covered that seemed extremely realistic to me. Christopher did not have a certain “super power”, was not perceived as a character that makes everyone feel better, etc. I really felt as if I was inside Christopher’s mind and was his shadow throughout the whole book, which was really cool to me.

I knew my thoughts and feelings on this book, but I was curious about how other people felt about the story. I searched “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time reviews” on Google to see what I came up with. A source that quickly caught my eye was one that was titled “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time opens on Broadway”. This was intriguing to me because as I was reading the book I often thought about how this story could be portrayed in a movie or even a play. As I was reading the reviews about the show, I concluded that it was quite different than the book. I suspected this, because it is hard to take a book that is written in first person narrative and turn it into a movie or production.

One final observation I made while reading this piece was the fact that I noticed everything we had been learning up until this point in the semester was suddenly coming full circle. What I mean by that is in the book, there were numerous references made by Christopher of pieces that we had already studied or other pieces we had talked about in class. For example, Sherlock Holmes was a big reference throughout, but there were some other ones too such as Star Trek, and even Blade Runner. I liked in the story how Christopher compared himself to Sherlock Holmes because I in a sense was comparing him to Holmes before he had even mentioned it himself. I picked up on the fact that Christopher was very into math and very good at it. That was his “power” if you were to call it that. Christopher’s references were also reassuring to me as to how and why individuals with autism can relate to those sources so closely.

This to me was a wonderfully written story, and an even better insight as to how children (and even others) with autism see the world in a more unique way than those who see it in a neurotypical sense.